Trai tightens curbs on spam calls

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has bolstered its measures to combat unwanted commercial communication, introducing stricter guidelines for telecom operators. The regulator has imposed an artificial intelligence and machine learning requirement for telecom firms to identify potential spam calls and has instituted a termination fee of ₹0.05 per minute for automated calls, known as application-to-person (A2P) calls or robocalls.

These bulk calls to users will now be subject to the termination fee, while regular commercial calls will remain unaffected.

In addition, telecom operators must now pre-declare their intent to use A2P calls along with the numbers they plan to use. Non-compliance with this declaration will result in the robocalls being classified as spam. The regulator's third amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, compels operators to deploy AI/ML systems for detecting suspected spam calls and to share this intelligence with other operators.

Furthermore, if five or more numbers linked to a sender are flagged as spam within a ten-day period, telecom companies must carry out a series of actions, including re-verifying Know Your Customer (KYC) information, conducting physical verifications, blocking outgoing services, and even disconnecting telecom services in cases of repeated violations.

However, telcos are specifically barred from flagging calls from the 1600 and 140 number series as spam to prevent the exclusion of legitimate, regulated commercial communications from reaching users.

Trai has also ruled out blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging of calls originating from the 1600 and 140 series numbers by call management apps (CMAs). The regulator emphasizes that such tagging, lacking the safeguards embedded in the regulatory framework, risks misclassifying genuine commercial communications and government communications as spam. These legitimate messages are crucial for customers and government purposes, and mislabeling them could have serious consequences.